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Edwidge Danticat joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “Two Men Arrive in a Village,” by Zadie Smith, which was published in The New Yorker in 2016. Danticat, a MacArthur Fellow and a winner of the Vilcek Prize in Literature, has published six books of fiction, including “Breath, Eyes, Memory,” “The Farming of Bones,” “Claire of the Sea Light,” and “Everything Inside.” Her memoir “Brother, I’m Dying” won the National Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, among others. She has been publishing fiction and nonfiction in The New Yorker since 1999.

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Louise Erdrich reads her story “Love of My Days,” from the June 2, 2025, issue of the magazine. Erdrich is the author of more than two dozen works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including the novels “The Round House,” which won the National Book Award in 2012, “The Night Watchman,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2021, and “The Mighty Red,” which was published last year.

But there, isn’t that a knock on the door, yes, it definitely is, and there, there’s another knock, and I can’t remember anyone knocking on my door in a long time, the last person to do it was Jatgeir, but that stopped when that woman moved in with him and turned everything upside down, so it’s been years now since he knocked on my door, but I guess it could be Jatgeir, and I’d probably better open the door then, but there are dirty dishes in the sink, and they’ve been there for several days, not that I use so many dishes, but, still, there might even be a little mold, and when’s the last time I aired out the place, no, not since I can remember, so it smells stuffy, yes, that’s the least you could say about it, it probably smells like me, too, and everything in here’s just a mess, in the hall, in the kitchen, in the living room, there are books everywhere, books and newspapers piled up on top of each other, and so if there’s a knock at the door and someone wants to come in here, to my mess, to my house’s mess, no, if only I’d known that someone was going to knock on my door, but how could I have thought that would happen, now that Jatgeir doesn’t come by anymore, because it’s been forever and a day since the last time he stopped by, and there’s another knock, no, I can’t believe it, and was the knock louder this time? maybe the knock was louder, or probably it’s just that I could hear it better this time and that’s why it sounded louder, yes, that must be what it was, but there’s another knock, because that is knocking, right? yes, it is, but weaker this time, yes, almost inaudible, maybe that was another knock or maybe it wasn’t, but I probably need to go open the door either way, it may well be Jatgeir, maybe he suddenly thought he should drop by and see me, or it might be someone else, there are probably lots of reasons someone might knock, maybe it’s someone coming with an important message for me, maybe someone’s died, but what relatives of mine could have died, no, I don’t know, but it could be something, yes, important, because I don’t have a telephone, and they probably wouldn’t send news that someone had died by letter, no, I can’t imagine that would ever happen, but there weren’t that many knocks, so now the person knocking must have given up since I didn’t open the door, and since the lights are on in the house the person who’s knocking probably thought that I didn’t want to open the door but there, yes, there’s another knock, and I can probably just open the door, I probably don’t need to invite whoever it is in, unless it’s Jatgeir of course, yes, that’s a strange name he has, Jatgeir, but it was his nickname, he told me that time I went to Bjørgvin with him on his motorboat that his name was Geir, he was baptized Geir, but that when he was young everyone started calling him Jatgeir, and I don’t really know why, but maybe because he always said yes to things when he was little, he said ja, ja, he always went along with things, he always jatta, and that sounds plausible, but no one really knows why he’s Jatgeir now, but he is, yes, so I need to invite him in, but only if it’s him, if it isn’t Jatgeir then we can probably just talk at the door, maybe, yes, why didn’t I think of that before, I can just open the door and then the person knocking and I can just stand in the doorway and talk, yes, of course, and there’s another knock, but this time it’s not hard or soft, it’s just a knock, just a little rap on the door, no more no less, but now, yes, now I’ll go and open the door, no more dawdling and thinking it over now, no, out to the hall and over to the door, straight there and right now, absolutely, so yes, I think and I open the living-room door and go out into the hall and just then there’s another knock, but it’s almost inaudible and that’s strange since just now the knocks were clear enough, but not loud or soft, just knocking, a rap on the door, no more no less, but now, yes, now I’ll open the door, no more dawdling and thinking it over now, no, out to the hall and over to the door, straight there and right now, absolutely, so yes, I think and I go over to the front door and just then there’s another knock, but it’s almost inaudible and that’s strange since just now the knocks were clear enough, but anyway I need to open the door now, it’s not the end of the world, it’s just that it’s been such a long time since anyone’s knocked on my door, so now—there’s another knock, and was it harder this time? or? but there, there, there’s another knock anyway and now I open the door, and since I never lock the door I just need to open it, and so I push down on the handle and I open the door and I look out and I don’t know who I think will be there, I have no idea, but no one’s there and, no, I would never have thought that, that no one would be there, because how was there a knocking all by itself, there’s no one in sight, no, this is almost spooky, but the person knocking can’t just have left right away like that, so fast, no, that’s impossible, there was knocking just now and I opened the door right after the last knock, and the person who was knocking can’t have just disappeared, no, I don’t believe it, that can’t have happened, people don’t do things like that, not people in Vaim anyway, and my goodness it’s so dark out, even though it’s so early in the day everything’s almost totally dark, it’s probably only around four o’clock in the afternoon and still it’s so dark that you can’t see anything, and, well, that’s how it is at this time of year, just before Christmas, so if I don’t see anyone I can always ask

Is anybody there? I say

and I don’t hear anything, and I think that I should say it again

Anybody there? I say

and it’s not like I expect to get an answer, and I don’t get an answer either, but where can the person who was knocking have disappeared to, he or she has to be somewhere, nothing else is possible, because thin air can’t knock on a door, or can it, no, but the wind can shake and rattle a door or other things, that’s true, but I heard so clearly that there was knocking, hard and for a long time, it was quiet and then there was another knock, but a careful one, no, I have to figure this out and I slip on my clogs and I go out the front door and I go over to the corner of the house, no, no one’s there, could it maybe be someone playing a joke on me, but now who would do that, maybe some kids, but there aren’t any kids living around here, there’ve been fewer and fewer children born in Vaim over the years, but now this is actually creepy, maybe it was a ghost, that’s possible, yes, everything seems to point to it being a ghost that was knocking on the door, and I’ve never had any doubt that ghosts exist, even if I’ve never seen or heard one before today, but, no, it can’t have been a ghost, and so it must have been a person, because there’s no animal that can knock like that on a door, no, and it can’t have been the wind, because it’s not windy now, there’s no wind, so in that case—yes, well, what can it have been, it must have been a person, but I can’t see anyone anywhere, and there’s fresh snow too, so that means I can go and look for footprints in the snow, I just need to go inside and get a flashlight and then walk around the house and see if I see footprints, and of course I need to check the road, or path I guess, that goes down to the main road, and then, yes, I need to put on some warm clothes, because it’s gotten cold out, I think and I go inside and put on my big thick jacket and pull a cap down over my ears and then I take the flashlight that’s hanging in its place in the hall and then I go right outside and I walk around the house and I shine the light both ahead of me and to either side, but there aren’t any footprints, not straight ahead of me and not to either side, and not on the road either, and it can’t have snowed since the knocking, no, of course not, and since there’s no wind it can’t be that snowdrifts have covered the footprints, no, I don’t understand, whoever knocked on my door must have vanished into thin air, as they say, it’s strange, I can’t understand it, I think, and it’s cold out so I guess I better go back inside, that knocking is what it is, I think, most likely the knocking was just something I imagined, I think and I go to the front door and I stamp my feet to knock the clumps of snow off my clogs, and then I realize that I need to turn off the flashlight, there’s no reason to have it on in the light from the house, I think, so I turn off the flashlight, knock the snow off my clogs, go into the hall, slip off my clogs, take off my jacket and cap, shut the front door, but that was really strange, I think, I must just have heard wrong, heard something that wasn’t there, just imagined that someone was knocking, yes maybe I felt so alone that I imagined someone knocking at my door, yes, that might be what happened, I can’t think of any other reasonable explanation, but there, yes, there’s a knock at the door again, and this, this isn’t something I’m just imagining, that’s a knock, and there’s another knock, yes, not just knocking, yes, there’s a real hammering on the door, yes, pounding, yes, it sounds almost like a thunderclap, no, not quite that bad, but almost, yes, almost like a thunderclap, but only almost, and there, there’s another knock, but not quite as hard now, no, this, I think, no, I’m not imagining this, I’m really hearing it, there’s no doubt about it, but now should I open the front door again, even though I couldn’t see anyone there the last time I opened the door, yes I probably should, I think and I go over to the door and now I hear something like a slow knocking and then, suddenly, I yank the door open and shout in an extremely irritated voice

Yes, who is it?

and I almost leap right out the door I’m so surprised by my own voice, and when I jump it feels like I’m breaking through some kind of gentle, comfortable wall, or how can I put it, it’s not warm or cold, and then I stand there outside the front door, all alone, and I look all around, up, down, behind everything, but there’s no one and nothing, no, this, I think, no, I can’t tell anybody this, not even Jatgeir, because they’ll think I’ve gone crazy, because there’s no way to believe that I’ve heard this, yes, they’d probably think I was like the people who heard voices and everyone thought they were crazy and sent them to The Madhouse in Bjørgvin, so I’m not going to say anything about this, not a word to anyone, I think, but what could it have been, or who, that’s a better way to put it, no, there was no way to understand it, it’s inexplicable, as they say, it’s actually spooky, yes, it’s so frightening that I don’t really want to go back to my room, but I have to, I have to lie down on the bench for a bit and rest, I think and I go and lie down on the bench and spread the blanket over me and I think that it feels like I need someone to talk to, but I don’t have too much contact with other people, well, yes, I had a little contact with my family, but even that’s tapered off too in recent years, after my parents died, those two sisters of mine never had all that much to do with me, to tell the truth, and then they got married and moved to other parts of the country, where the men they married came from, that’s where they live, each with her husband, and they’ve had children, too, one had two daughters, the other had a son, and then, the children, yes, I’m these children’s uncle but all of them are grown now, good and grown up, or almost grown up, and I’m not in touch with my sisters much, so I haven’t had any contact at all with those two girls and that one boy I’m an uncle to, to tell the truth I’m not even entirely sure of their names, yes, well, one is named Karen Elise, or maybe they write it “Karen-Elise,” if it isn’t Marte Elise, actually, and then there’s Gudrun Anna or Anna Gudrun, and there couldn’t be a hyphen between Anna and Gudrun or Gudrun and Anna, could there, no, I don’t think so, but I can’t be sure of that, either, and as for which of the two is named what I can never manage to remember that, but the other sister has a son, and his name is Olaf, and that’s easy to remember since he was named after my father, after my and my sisters’ father, but my father’s two sisters, my aunts, it was even worse with them, not that their names were so hard, they were Gudrun and Olaug, both fine names, and I knew that they were named after my father’s parents, yes, my grandmother was named Olaug and my grandfather was named Gudmund, that’s how it was, if I’m not remembering wrong, but even I couldn’t be wrong about something like that, but I could never remember which one was Gudrun and which one was Olaug, no, but I usually managed to get through situations that could have been embarrassing by talking about both Olaug and Gudrun in general, but is that something I should be thinking about now, no, definitely not, certainly not after I heard a mysterious knocking at my door without there being anyone there knocking, no matter how hard I looked, and now I realize I’m feeling anxious, and I think I’ll just go and drop by Jatgeir’s house, even if it’s been forever and a day since the last time I did that, because to try to soothe this anxiety a little I’ll just go and see him, this anxiety doesn’t feel good at all, no, and to tell the truth it’s been years now since I’ve visited Jatgeir and to tell the truth he’s the only person in Vaim I ever visit, so if I’m going to do it again it might as well be now, to put it that way, but it kind of hasn’t been the same since she, what was her name again, yes, Eline, right, since she came back with him when he took his summer boat trip to Bjørgvin that time, the way he always used to do every summer, but that was many years ago, yes, time goes by so fast that it’s already many years ago now, he didn’t come back home alone, no, that summer he brought a woman back with him, and not just any woman, either, but someone who up until then, this was what people said anyway, was married and living on Sartor, but she’d grown up in Vaim and, funnily enough, the boat Jatgeir had had all those years was called Eline, and maybe that was why the woman he brought back home was called Eline too, so now Jatgeir was living with her in sin, at least that was what some of the prayerhouse people said, and it was hard to believe that Jatgeir would do something like that, come dragging some married woman back to Vaim who’d left a long time before, someone barely anyone in Vaim even remembered and wouldn’t have remembered if it weren’t for this going and kidnapping the bride, yes, that was what they called it in the countryside, kidnapping the bride, people talked about how her husband might come to Vaim one day to get his wife back and he’d beat Jatgeir to death, or at least beat him up badly, because the man she was married to was surely a big strong man, and a fisherman on Sartor, but for all I know he was just glad to get rid of his wife, that was another rumor going around, that that’s how it was, it was probably one of the guys at The Quay, below The Vaim General Store, who’d said that maybe it was like that, and if only there was a meeting tonight in The Vaim Prayerhouse I could have some company there, but there isn’t, and I haven’t gone to see anyone other than Jatgeir for years, earlier I used to drop by and see him a lot, and Jatgeir would come and see me at least as often, but ever since he’s had a common-law partner, as they call it, yes, it’s like he wasn’t the same anymore, so now I can go forever and a day without seeing him, not that she, yes, his partner, yes, Eline, minded at all when I did stop by once, after such a long time, no, she retreated to the kitchen and then maybe poked her head out and asked if she could make us a cup of coffee or something and then Jatgeir said that might be good and I said yes please, thanks, that’d be great, and then Jatgeir and I sat there and everything was like it used to be in the old days, but only almost like it used to be, because everything was kind of completely different, it was like Jatgeir had turned into a different person somehow, even if he looked exactly like the same old Jatgeir, but something had changed, no question about it, he’d become shy in a way he never used to be before, more withdrawn, like he had to be careful all the time and he couldn’t just say whatever he wanted anymore, he had to think it over before he said almost anything, to make sure he didn’t say something that might be offensive, or whatever the term is, and the only thing I could think of that had changed was her, Eline, who had moved in with him, and even if she had come quietly and unnoticed her being there wouldn’t have stayed unnoticed, if you can put it that way, because the living room was unrecognizable, the pile of old newspapers in the middle of the floor, of old issues of the Northern Herald, the pile that had grown week after week, and would have filled up the whole room sooner or later, I think, and driven Jatgeir out of his own living room, now the pile of newspapers was gone, and where multiple years’ worth of newspapers had once stood there was now just a gaping void that you sort of couldn’t help looking at the whole time, and then the curtains, they had been the same for all those years but now they’d been replaced by curtains with a pattern of large flowers in all kinds of colors, the ones that had been there before had been brown, not even the sofa cushions were the same old cushions, and I just couldn’t bring myself to ask where the old newspapers had gone, the old curtains, no, nothing was the way it was before, and that meant I didn’t really like going to visit him, and he never came by to visit me anymore, but who else could I go and see, probably no one, to tell the truth, so I’d probably better stay at home, I think, and if I was going to go somewhere I’d have to wear good shoes and my nice warm coat, but it’s probably best for me just to stay home, and not worry about whatever that knocking was, it was most likely just something I imagined, I think and then I must have dozed off, because I wake up, and the first thing I think about is the knocking there was on the door before I lay down, yes, I just couldn’t understand it—but now there’s another knock, hard, yes, so hard it makes me jump, I must have fallen asleep, I don’t know for how long, and now a knocking suddenly woke me up, and I sit up on the bench, and now there’s more knocking on the door, hard now too, but not as hard as before, no, this is, and I stand up and go out to the hall and there’s another knock on the door, but now it’s pretty soft, no, it’s just something I’m imagining, there’s nothing else it can be, so I won’t open the door, if there’d been footprints in the snow I’d know for sure that it’s just some kids playing a joke on me, that it’s a prank, and now these kids have hidden somewhere or other and are laughing about how they tricked me, even scared me, yes, but I guess that’s fine, they can do that, there isn’t that much for kids in Vaim to do, probably the only fun they have is what they come up with themselves, but it’s strange I didn’t think of that before, that it was a kid, not a ghost, I must have turned into someone who’s easily tricked and easily scared too, I’ve started believing in all kinds of things, but there’s another knock, and now as hard as can be, so I probably need to open the door again, and if there’s no one there then at least I’ll know that there are some rascals lurking in the dark somewhere, giggling and snickering and having a good laugh about how they tricked me again, but this time they won’t see me looking scared at least, they sure won’t, not that, no, not this time, and there’s another knock, a little harder than last time even, and now I’ll open it right away, so, over to the door, yank it open—and look, but can you believe it, if it’s not Jatgeir himself standing there, no, who would believe it, I’m going around thinking that I should drop by Jatgeir’s house and he must have been thinking the same thing, because if it isn’t Jatgeir himself standing here in person

You must be surprised to see me, Jatgeir says

and I think that I probably can’t say that I was just pacing around my living room thinking that I should go and see him, and definitely not that there’d been a knocking and pounding and hammering on the door for a good long time and then when I went to open the door there was no one there, and that I’d gotten a bit anxious and scared and so I thought I’d go see my old friend

Come in, I say

I believe I will, he says

Come in, old man, I say

and Jatgeir walks through the door and I say, It’s been a long time since we’ve seen each other, I honestly can’t remember when the last time was, it’s been so long, I say and Jatgeir says he’d guess it’s been several years and I say I can believe it and Jatgeir says no, he can’t remember exactly when the last time was

No, our memory’s not as good as it used to be, I say

True enough, he says

That’s how things are with us, Elias, he says

Elias, Jatgeir says

Yes, I say

When I got here I saw someone standing outside your door, he says

Someone was standing outside my door, I say

Yes, yes, I saw someone there, I saw it when I came around the corner of the house, he says

and I don’t say anything

And the strange thing was that he just suddenly disappeared, he says

It was a man, I say

No, I can’t say for sure, but I’m sure that someone was standing there, he says

Really, I say

And it wasn’t so strange that someone was there, the strange thing was that he suddenly disappeared, yes, vanished into thin air, he says

It was eerie, he says

“No—it’s click once to signal the job is done, twice to turn the fan off, and three times for the fan-and-lights combo.”

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Yes, I say

and I think about whether I should tell Jatgeir after all that there’d been the sound of knocking, yes, practically pounding on my door, and that it had scared me, but maybe the best thing would be not to tell anyone about that, probably, because then everything would just get even more frightening, I’d get even more anxious, or maybe not, because at least now I know for certain that some kind of ghost was at my door, there couldn’t be any doubt about it now, or maybe there could, in some strange abstract way, abstract, yes, now that’s a word to use in this situation, but a ghost probably is abstract if it exists at all, because you can’t say it’s concrete, can you, a spirit that exists in some way without a body is probably what a ghost is, or however you’d put it, but it was weird that Jatgeir knocked on my door right afterward, could it be that the knocking was a sign he was about to come, a warning, an omen, as they say, but can that really happen, for someone to, for example, knock before they actually come and knock, no, it can’t be, things like that don’t happen, but, anyway, Jatgeir’s here now, but he needs to come in and not just stand in the doorway, I have to ask him again to come in, and then I can offer him a cup of coffee

You’ll take a cup of coffee, I say

and Jatgeir just looks at me

You’re not scared of ghosts? he says

and I don’t really know what to say, and Jatgeir sort of answers for me, no probably not really, he says, and I can only nod in response

So that’s how it is, Jatgeir says

and then it’s quiet again, and suddenly, without warning, Jatgeir says that he has to go home

But you just got here, I say

Yes, but there’s something I forgot, he says

I just realized it, he says

So I’m going now, I have to hurry, he says

and I say that, well, anyone can forget something, but he should come by again soon, I say

But I actually just wanted to say a quick hello, he says

I need to hurry, he says

and I say I understand, yes, even though I don’t understand anything he’s saying, no

Talk to you soon, Jatgeir says

See you later, I say

and I see Jatgeir turn around and start to walk away from the house, he’s walking slowly, and then he sort of disappears around the corner of the house, and I stay where I am looking out the open door and for some reason I decide that I want to leave the door open, but I can’t do that, it’s cold out, I can’t leave the door open and let all the cold in, no, it’d be better if I took a walk, I’ll just put on my warm coat and then my black sailor’s cap, the one I always wear, and I don’t exactly know why I’ve worn a black sailor’s cap all these years, but there it is, so I’ll put my things on and head out to The Vaim General Store, because it’s probably open, but I can’t think of anything I need to buy, still, I can just take a walk over there, I think, since I don’t know where else I could go, if there was a meeting at The Vaim Prayerhouse I’d have gone there, yes, I’d even go to Jatgeir’s house, if he hadn’t just been here, so if I want to see people I guess I’ll just go to The Vaim General Store then, but on Sunday there’s a service at The Vaim Church, not that I’m a believer, but I go to the prayerhouse and the church anyway, just to be with other people, and I’m kind of a believer, too, in my way, and I look forward to going to church on Sundays, I think, so off I go to The Vaim General Store, because maybe I can talk a little with the guys who are usually there at The Quay, and then I’ll probably remember some little thing I can buy, but I was just there to do my shopping a couple of days ago so I can’t think of anything I can buy today, but the guys at The Quay will definitely be there, at least some of them, today too, so I can probably talk to them for a bit, the way I sometimes do, not that often, I’m not one of the guys who hang around there all the time, but I don’t want to stay home anyway, I need to calm my nerves, as they say, so let’s put on that sailor’s cap and outer coat and these good solid shoes and then I’m off, yes, and I put them on and go out the front door, and shut the door behind me and then I walk down the side road to the country road and then I take a left and then go straight down to The Vaim General Store, no, I don’t want to think about that knocking on the door, or that short visit from Jatgeir, either, I think and without thinking about either thing I walk fast, because it’s a cool night, and I try to think of something I can buy at The Vaim General Store, but I can’t think of anything, so I don’t even need to go into the store, I can just go down to The Quay and talk for a bit with the guys there, because over there, yes, there are some guys standing there the way there usually tend to be, and that’s good, isn’t it, because there isn’t always someone there, even if there usually is, but they don’t look too talkative today, they’re just standing there silently with their heads bent, not how they usually stand there, they usually stand there talking a little and laughing about this or that, so nothing’s the way it usually is today, I think, and then they hear me walking over and everyone looks up at me and then they look back down again and it doesn’t look like any of them are going to say, here comes our prayerhouse man today, or here comes our churchman, no, it doesn’t look like any of them has anything at all to say today, but I’ll probably still go over to them, there’s nothing else I can really do since I’m already on my way toward the guys on The Quay, and I go down to them, I stop, don’t say anything, and none of them looks at me, they just stand there looking down and now someone’s got to say something

Not too chatty today are you, I say

and it takes a long time before one of them looks straight ahead instead of down

Yes, it’s sad, he says

and I stand there and wonder what he means, what he’s saying is sad

That he’s gone, yes, he says

And you were such good friends, you and him, another one says

and again it’s silent

What are you talking about, I say

and all the guys standing there, maybe four or five guys, look up and lean toward me

Yes, I say

That he’s gone? I say

Yes, Jatgeir, he says

What do you mean? I say

Jatgeir died today, he says

and he looks at me not understanding

Jatgeir, I say

and no one says anything

You haven’t heard? one of them says then

Heard what? I say

That Jatgeir died today, he says

and I shake my head

No, but, I say

He was found floating in the sea, dead, next to his boat, he says

I was just talking to him, yes, it can’t have been more than half an hour ago, I say

and they look at me again, not understanding

But he was found several hours ago, drowned, one of them says

I just saw him, yes, I talked to him right before I came down here, and it’s not that long a walk, I say

No, he was found a couple of hours ago, drowned, one of them says

She, yes, that common-law partner of his, right, she found him floating in the sea next to his motorboat, he says

And she couldn’t manage to pull him back onto land, and then she found a rope and she tied him to the dock and then, he says

And then I came walking by, he says

And then she shouted that I had to come help her, and when I went down there I saw Jatgeir lying there, floating in the cold water with his nose pointing up in the air, he says

and again no one says anything and I think now that’s too much for me, that’s just too much, I don’t understand anything in the world anymore, because I was just talking to Jatgeir, and he was as alive and well as ever, and didn’t we talk about how I should come and visit him, no, we didn’t talk about that, but still, I think

I was just talking to Jatgeir, I say

Yes, right before I came here, I say

“If you’re all-powerful, how come you let yourself get so old?”

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Yes well then he rose up from the dead, one of them says

Yes, like another Christ, he says

There’s a lot you can accuse Jatgeir of, but he wasn’t another Christ, someone else says

But you know more about that kind of thing than we do, a third one says

The doctor came and looked at him and declared him dead, there was nothing to do to try to save him, one says

and it’s silent, totally silent, and my thoughts kind of go back and forth without them being thought, and I’m frozen in place, just standing there

Yes, the two of you were good friends, one says

Yes, I say

Yes, even if you were a prayerhouse person, Elias, and he sure wasn’t, one says

and again it’s silent, and I think that I probably can’t just stay standing here, I have to keep going, whatever that means, I think

Yes, it’s sad, one says

Very sad, another one says

And so unexpected, he says

Because he’d spent his whole life on the water, another one says

I can’t understand it, a third one says

No, I say

It’s like there’s nothing you can say about it, one says

and then what they’re saying turns into a droning buzz of voices, and I can’t tell the difference between what one of them is saying and what the others are saying, the words and the sentences blend into one another the same way my thoughts are blending into one another, and I was just talking to Jatgeir, but, no, I can’t understand it, and then it probably was him who knocked on my door, yes, after he’d already drowned, yes, that’s how it must have been, that’s the only explanation, if I can call it an explanation, and it’s spooky, I think, but why did he come by to talk to me after he was dead, yes, like back in the old days, as if nothing had changed, no, probably no one can understand things like that, I think, it was like he came to say goodbye, I think, and I guess I can’t do anything but go back home now, because what else can I do then, I don’t have anywhere else to go

Yes, O.K., see you later, I say

and there’s a sound like thanks, you too, or something like that from the guys there on The Quay and then I turn around and start to walk home

See you at the prayerhouse, one of them says behind me

Or in church, another one says

Yes, and of course at Jatgeir’s funeral, a third one says

and I think that it’s unbelievable, but Jatgeir was a good person, and my only friend in Vaim, yes, probably the best friend I had in my whole adult life, and if he’s gone now, yes, then he’s gone, that’s for certain, and as for what he believed or didn’t believe, we never talked about that, and he probably never set foot in The Vaim Prayerhouse or The Vaim Church, either, but what does that mean, no, I think, and I think that this drowning had something to do with Eline in a way, that he couldn’t stand living with her anymore, that he got careless and fell into the sea because of that, either he was going to just check on his boat or he was going for a little ride, but if that was what happened then it should really have happened a long time ago, because Eline had been living in his house for forever and a day, she just moved right in, just did what she wanted, yes, that’s really it, she got on board his boat some way or another, and Jatgeir couldn’t get her off his boat, she was just there, on the boat and later in his house, and who knows, maybe it was because he’d named his boat Eline that she dared to do it, I don’t know, but why in the world had he named his boat Eline and then someone named Eline came on board the boat and then moved in with him, no, it’s impossible to understand, I think, and I think that now I’ll go straight home and then I’ll pull myself together and pray for Jatgeir, I think, and I’ll miss him, because if you could say I had any friend at all in Vaim it was Jatgeir, in all of Vaim his was the only house I’ve ever been in, and he was the only person who ever came through the door of my humble home, I never really got to know the people I met at The Vaim Prayerhouse or in The Vaim Church, and I probably won’t ever get to know them, either, but after that Eline moved in with Jatgeir, yes, it wasn’t so nice to see him anymore, I kind of got the feeling that Eline didn’t like me coming to visit, and she most likely didn’t like Jatgeir coming to see me either, and that’s why he stopped coming over to my house, and I stopped going over to his house too, so it was not least because of that that it was such a surprise to see him standing outside my door today, and then this, yes, that he drowned today, and around the same time he was talking to me, no, it’s unbelievable and you can’t understand it either, but anyway, he probably came over to say goodbye, maybe, that’s what must have happened, and now I have no one I can say I’m friends with in Vaim, there are just these prayerhouse people and church people left, but they don’t really count since I kind of never got to know them, we kind of just belonged to the same organizations and so now I’m even more alone than I was before, and there, yes, there, I can feel that it’s like Jatgeir is near me, but it’s not that I can see him, and he seems happy and it’s like he’s waving goodbye and he says that it’s good where he is now, and I feel like Jatgeir is looking down at me now from somewhere above me, but not that far above me, and I get the feeling that he now knows everything that’s going to happen in the future, with me too, and he somehow takes it all in with a happy calm, and I could probably say in Christian words that he is in God’s peace now and in the light of Christ’s cross, but I feel like those are kind of just meaningless words and I raise my arm and I wave at him and it’s like he raises his arm and waves at me and with a kind of joy he says, it’s good here, and I, walking up the road in Vaim, I raise my hand and wave at the sky, at where I feel like Jatgeir is, and everything feels right, but what would someone think if they saw me doing this, but after all there isn’t anyone who can see me, yes, except for Jatgeir

Goodbye, Jatgeir, I say

And thank you for our time together, I say

and I see Jatgeir, see his hand and arm, disappear into the dark sky ♦

This is drawn from “Vaim.”

Your story “Elias” (translated, from the Norwegian, by Damion Searls) is the internal monologue of a man in a small village in Norway, a loner, with only one friend, from whom he is somewhat estranged. Elias is one of three narrators in your forthcoming novel “Vaim.” He plays a minor role in the actual plot of the book, so why was it important for him to be at the center of it?

To me, writing is an act of listening. I listen, of course, to what I have already written. And then to something unknown, somewhere out there. The writing is this listening, to write is to listen. I don’t plan anything. Writing happens.

Elias is an anxious person and an isolated one. How easy was it for you to inhabit his thoughts?

Not difficult at all. I feel sympathy for all my characters. And in a certain way I think every character in what I have written is also partly the person I am.

Elias is estranged from his friend, Jatgeir, because a woman came into Jatgeir’s life and moved in with him. Why is that situation so alienating for Elias?

Because the woman who moves in with Jatgeir doesn’t like Elias. Or at least she doesn’t like that Jatgeir keeps company with him. Why she is like that I don’t know. Often we don’t know why something is the way it is in life, and so also in fiction. My job is to paint a picture, to write a kind of story, not to explain it.

The story involves an encounter with a ghost, or at least with what seems to be a living person, though that person has actually already died some distance away. How do you conceive of ghosts? As actual spirits, released from their corporeal form, or visions conjured up by the eyes or minds of those who see them—or something else?

I feel the word “ghost” is wrong, it limits the experience that Elias has too much, or explains it too much. Your question is relevant for both Elias and me: What is actually happening? Is it real at all? Elias doesn’t know. I don’t know. As a writer, I am writing exactly what is there, out there, what it means I don’t know. If I knew it, I ought not to have written it. I don’t see any point in writing riddles. Life is enigmatic in itself.

Your seven-volume novel “Septology” was told in a single sentence. So is “Vaim.” No periods appear in “Elias,” though you do use paragraph breaks for dialogue. What is the benefit for you of writing in this way, without allowing the pause or sense of finality that a period would give the reader?

Writing “Septology” that way just felt right. It provided the novel with the right flow. I learned something from writing that way that I perhaps used when I wrote “Vaim.” It wasn’t that I set out to write without periods, but you have to follow the dictates of the writing in each and every way.

I never intend anything. I am sure that when I am writing with intention the writing will suffer. It isn’t about my intentions, or my plans, my ideas, but about the intention of something that’s already there and that I, so to speak, have to bring to the visible world.

“Vaim” is the first in a trilogy of novels set in the fictional village of Vaim. What makes this place such a productive one for your fiction? Is it based on your home village?

I wouldn’t call it a trilogy. They are three separate novels that are connected because they are set in the same imaginary place. It isn’t the village where I grew up, either, though it shares elements from various places in the western part of Norway, where everything I write is situated, to the degree that it exists somewhere outside the fiction at all.

But seen from another perspective everything I write is connected to the village where I grew up and lived my most formative years, even if I haven’t lived there since I was fifteen. The language, the landscape, the moods derive from that place. ♦

This month, the beloved British pop band Pulp will release “More,” its first new album in twenty-four years. Jarvis Cocker, the band’s founder, lyricist, and front man, has engaged in innumerable interesting projects in the meantime—an album with his band Jarv Is, collaborations with Wes Anderson and Chilly Gonzales, a BBC radio program, an excellent memoir, “Good Pop Bad Pop”—but the new Pulp record feels like a significant return, triumphant and humble at once. Its first song, “Spike Island,” establishes a friendly, self-deprecating tone (“I exist / To do this: / Shouting & pointing,” Cocker sings) and the rest is full of Cocker’s signature motifs—half-serious spoken-word amusement, playful imagery—warmly suited to life in 2025. (“Please stay in touch with me / In this contactless society.”) On “Grown Ups,” he mentions life being about the journey, not the destination, and asks, “But what if you get travel sick / Before you’ve even left the station?” Elsewhere, he sings, “Instead of having us this Slow Death / We should be having us a Slow Jam.” At their best, Cocker’s songs can feel like a shared groove, with dancing as good an answer as any to life’s joys and befuddlements.

Cocker grew up in Sheffield, in north-central England, with his mother and sister; his father left when Jarvis was seven. He formed the first incarnation of Pulp at fifteen. He gave a demo tape to John Peel, the legendary British broadcaster and tastemaker, at a local event; Peel’s producer called two weeks later, and Pulp was off to the races. After releasing a couple of albums in the eighties, the band became hugely popular in the nineties, amid Britpop, owing to its catchy melodies, danceable rhythms, and Cocker’s sly, funny, sharply observant lyrics, with themes of class consciousness, sex, and the gentle absurdities of the human condition—all of which reached an apotheosis in the song “Common People,” which turned into an anthem. Pulp’s celebrity became uncomfortable for Cocker in the late nineties, and the band went on hiatus in 2002. They’ve toured occasionally since, notably in 2012, when a farewell show in Sheffield was documented in the 2014 movie “Pulp: A Film About Life, Death, and Supermarkets.”

Cocker’s book “Good Pop Bad Pop,” from 2022, is structured around anecdotes prompted by various objects he’d stored in a crawl space. A notebook from his youth, in which he described how Pulp would change music as we know it. (“The group shall work its way into the public eye by producing fairly conventional, yet slightly off-beat, pop songs. After gaining a well-known and commercially successful status the group can then begin to subvert and restructure both the music-business and music itself.”) A news clipping from 1985 (“Cocker Comes a Cropper”) about the time he fell out of a window while trying to impress a woman with a party trick, which led to injury and artistic breakthrough. A Polaroid of his first electric guitar, given to him when he was thirteen, by his mother’s boyfriend, a German scuba instructor they’d met on vacation in Ibiza. The memoir is not comprehensive or chronological; it’s made up of bursts of inspiration, thoughtfully threaded together.

In a similar spirit, perhaps, Cocker and I recently visited MOMA, where we took in two exhibits composed of bits of things—“Robert Frank’s Scrapbook Footage” and “The Clock,” Christian Marclay’s magisterial film collage—and then proceeded to the National Arts Club, where we talked about life, art, the new Pulp album, and the passage of time. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

[Cocker begins.] Have you heard the record?

Yeah. It’s great. I listened at the Rough Trade offices.

I did too—the Rough Trade offices played it for everybody there and I went.

So when you listened to it for the first time you were with them?

Well, I set it going and I went downstairs. It’s an open-plan office, so I could hear it and I didn’t have to look at people whilst they listened. At one point, I poked my head in and said, “That’s the end of side one.” Because I still think of it as two sides. A side of a record is a good length of time to listen to something. CDs are always too long.

And then there’s the formlessness of the digital era, where you just listen to everything in any order—

And there’s no order in anything. Maybe that’s the future. I saw a picture taken inside an Amazon warehouse and it’s just a mess, all jumbled up. Things aren’t put in particular places because it’s not necessarily a human who will go and say, “Oh, I need to go to where the books are” or “I need to go to where the records are.” It’s got location tracking so you say “I want this” and a robot—bzz—might go to find it. There’s no need to file things neatly or put things together. So that’s quite a new way of . . . The world is kind of becoming like that.

Have you seen any of “The Clock” before?

I’ve not seen the whole thing. It’s very long. I’ve been watching the Chris Marker film “Sans Soleil.” That’s a bit similar—like it’s mostly things that he shot, and he put commentary over it to have it make some kind of sense. It’s a lot to take in, so I watch in ten-minute chunks. Let’s have a look at “The Clock.” [We watch from 11:20 A.M. to 11:50 A.M., then head downtown.]

Sorry to bring this up, but in “The Clock,” there’s that horrible scene [from Don Sharp’s “The Thirty Nine Steps” (1978)] where a man dangles from the giant clock hand of Big Ben. It made me think of the part in your book about—

Ah, falling from the window.

I’m so sorry that happened.

Well, it was my own fault. But as I said in the book, it was kind of a turning point. I wasn’t happy that it happened, but it made me stop for a minute and look at what I was doing, and I decided to do things differently.

You decided to make art out of what was in your life as it existed, right? Not trying to think of a different place or time or—

Yeah. Inspiration not being something that’s beamed in from the cosmos. To look at exactly what is around you. That’s the trick. You have to let yourself appreciate things all the time.

I love that lyric in “Grown Ups,” about a dream of looking at another planet through a telescope, seeing the people there having fun, going to the other planet, and then looking back at the Earth and seeing that it looks like a pretty good time back there, too. But now you’re stuck.

That was a real dream I had.

Really?

Yeah. I had it a few years ago and I wrote it down. That song is the oldest song on the record. The music was demoed when we did the Pulp album “This Is Hardcore” (1998), a long time ago. I knew I wanted to call it “Grown Ups” but I couldn’t think of any words beyond that. I lost confidence in it. And then when we were trying to get songs together for this record, I thought, This is it. This is its last chance.

You started writing “Grown Ups” around “This Is Hardcore”?

Yeah. Maybe thirty years ago. Now I am grown up.

It also makes me think of your Jarv Is song “Must I Evolve?” Some of these songs are about embracing being wherever you are in life.

Yes, I suppose accepting it and trying to do something with it, not pretending. Because that’s the thing that gives me pain. You don’t want to be aging, but you are.

Can you tell me how the new album came about?

Well, practically the way it came about was when we were touring in the U.K. in 2023, there was a song, “The Hymn of the North,” that had been written for a play called “Light Falls” (2019), written by Simon Stephens, a quite well-known playwright in the U.K. He gave me the script and said, “Can you write a song that keeps coming into the play?” So I’d done that.

And what was that song meant to do?

The play was about a mother who dies and then can go back and see what her kids are doing. My son was sixteen, and I started to become aware of the fact that school would end in a couple of years, and then he would go and live his life. And that slightly petrified me. Just wondering about whether I would see him, thinking about my own relationship with my mother, where I would go months without seeing her. And so that kind of got the ball rolling. Also, Steve [Mackey], the bass player in Pulp, he passed away before that tour started. And my mother died at the beginning of last year. So it was a bit of what we were talking about—when someone close to you passes away, one of the ways to deal with it is to think, O.K., well, I better make the most of my life now, or what’s left of it. I just thought it would be good for us to see whether we could get enough songs together for a record.

How did it feel writing those songs for Pulp? You’ve been writing for yourself and for different projects, like Jarv Is, for a while.

That’s a good question, actually. The first time we had a rehearsal, I thought the band had played a trick on me, and that they had moved the keys up, because it was really hard to get to all the notes. But as you get older, it gets harder to hit high notes. So I thought, I could ask them to change the key, but maybe I’ll just see if I can get back up there. And I did manage to get there. I didn’t change the key of any of them.

Wow. And does it strain your voice?

[In yelping falsetto.] Yes, it does! It’s very painful! [Laughs.] I stopped drinking milk. That’s my tip for readers. Big difference. Once I was able to do it, it was quite exciting. When you’ve managed to play a song that’s twenty years old or whatever, it does kind of take you back to what you thought when you wrote it. You start to channel that same kind of energy through it. And through the course of my life, I have put a lot of my energy into songs. Maybe I should have put it into other things, who knows? But that’s where I put a lot of my life, in songs.

Is there a certain sound that you feel works for Pulp that you wouldn’t try in your other projects?

I don’t know. I think that’s not really down to me, actually. I think that’s down to the band. As in—one thing I’ve realized is that, you know, Nick [Banks], the drummer, is very, very loud. The drummer who played in Jarv Is was, I don’t know, a fifth as loud. That changes the way everybody plays, because you’ve got to try and make yourself heard over the top of these drums . . . so it gives it a certain feel, you know? It’s not so much a thought-out thing. It’s just how the people are, how they play, it makes it sound a certain way.

And how does it feel to play with your old band members again?

It was good. It’s a funny thing, when you’re in a band with somebody it’s a very intimate thing. You get to know somebody because you’re making something together, so you rely on each other. But you’re not talking about anything, you’re just doing it, you know?

The tour had a really special feeling, I thought. I went to one of the shows in Brooklyn in the fall.

That was in that Kings Theatre. A good venue.

It seemed like everyone got there early, everyone was very keyed into it, very focussed. It’s a fancy, old, beautiful place with velvet seats and everything, and everyone was standing up. It wasn’t raucous, but it was very felt, it seemed to me. Did it feel that way to you?

It was—I especially liked that venue. The shows in America were really good. Pulp really hadn’t played any proper tour in America, I think. We did one on a bus once. It was a bit of a disaster. We had this one show in New Orleans, and there were ten people there or something. I think that was 1994. We weren’t so well known then.

On the tour last fall, you played a couple of songs that would make it onto the album, including “Spike Island.” That was the site of a famous Stone Roses show, right?

Yeah. I never went, but I’ve ended up writing two songs based on what people have told me about it. The first one was “Sorted for E’s and Wizz” (1995).

So what’s happening in “Spike Island”?

It mentions “The Garden of Earthly Delights” [by Hieronymus Bosch]. That painting is quite important for me. My now wife—we started our relationship fifteen years ago, and then in around 2018 we were apart for a year, and then we got back together. So the song is kind of about that, really. When we got back together, we were seeing whether it was a good idea or not, and we went to Madrid, and the painting is on display at the Prado. Usually the bit that you see is the right-hand panel, which is an end-of-the-world kind of thing. But what really struck me when I saw it was the central panel—that’s the garden of earthly delights. And I just looked at it for about twenty-five minutes.

What’s happening in the central panel?

There’s a lot of interpretations of it. You’ve got the Garden of Eden on the left panel, and the central panel is kind of square, and there are these funny structures and lots of, like, giant strawberries. One interpretation is that that’s what the world would have been like if we hadn’t got thrown out of the Garden of Eden. That would be what humanity would have developed into—just having a great time with giant strawberries and things like that. And then the right side is all dark, and it’s like what the modern world has done to humanity. But I chose to focus on the possibilities of the middle one.

Anyway, we got back together.

Do you feel like you’ve had a more focussed-on-giant-strawberries time since you’ve stayed together?

I think as you get older, you realize you can decide—well, obviously, things happen which will put you in a certain mood, but you can decide to focus on one thing or another, and if you want to go down the giant-strawberry route, you can, you know? But you’ve just got to believe it. Some people don’t go down that route at all, and everything is kind of a drag to them all the time.

Have you seen the Mike Leigh movie “Hard Truths” yet?

Is that the new one? No, I haven’t seen it yet.

That’s a question you’ll be asking yourself throughout, why are some people so happy and why are others—I mean, obviously some people are depressed and things, but it can be sort of mysterious sometimes, to what extent happiness is a choice.

It’s difficult to say that, isn’t it, because some people have it hard. I think you realize that the world is—there was a Jarv Is song, we never even recorded it, about everything being awesome and awful at the same time. You know, it is. And you just decide which one you’re going to look at.

That makes me think of the part of your book about being in the hospital, recovering from the window accident, and getting to know the other guys and realizing that there are good townies and bad townies and good indie weirdos and bad indie weirdos and that everyone’s a little of both.

Yeah. Being in the hospital, I was among people who I would have been frightened of walking around town, and I just realized they were all right. I think that’s an important thing, you know, to realize that everybody’s the same, really. It’s a big platitude, but it’s true, and that isn’t the dominant message at the moment.

Do you remember what you wrote immediately following the time in the hospital?

Well, it was a very old-fashioned hospital, like a long ward with beds all along the side. So I did character studies of all the guys who were there, because I’d been struck by this idea—that I had to look at everything around me in as much detail as possible. And that if I could capture everything, it would mean something. That’s why that Joe Gould book interested me, with the oral history. [Joseph Mitchell’s “Joe Gould’s Secret,” 1965.] He’s trying to take everything in and write it down. And I do still feel that a detail in a song is what will catch people, will make them pay attention. It makes it genuine in some way.

The way that you interact with the audience both on your songs and onstage—there’s a very natural familiarity there. A lot of the songs have funny little details that feel like you’re talking to us like a friend, someone who will understand your viewpoint.

That’s probably because I’m not that talkative in normal life. That’s part of the contradiction, really, because the main issue that I’ve had in my personal relationships is people say I don’t communicate very well. I’ve never liked confrontation and stuff like that. I don’t like to be the center of attention in a social group, you know? . . . If I could communicate with people who I care about so that they don’t get irritated, that would be good.

It’s harder sometimes to have interpersonal conversations that say basic, important things—it just feels way too loaded. I mean, you don’t have intense emotional relationships with everyone in your audience, you know?

That’s a good thing. It’s like the audience for me is an entity. I can see that it’s made up of people, and I’m always curious as to why those people are there. But, yeah, it’s easier than just one person. And I don’t know whether that’s because—I mention in the book the fact that I was shortsighted from birth. You know, I can only see, like, that far away. So maybe I had to address the world as some kind of blur—as a kid, that’s what it was. So I just got into the habit of it.

I love the part in your book about listening to Barry White and being inspired by him. I never would have made that connection—how he’ll break it down and have a talking part in a song, like you. And you have a deep voice, like him.

Yeah! His music’s got a great sound to it, and I like how the way he speaks is kind of rhythmical, but it’s not rapping at all, he’s just talking. I’d never really heard that used so much in songs before. The first time we tried it I wrote a song called “My Legendary Girlfriend” (1992), which was musically quite indebted to him, as well. And I think that’s how you can get something interesting to happen. You hear something that you like and you try and do it yourself and you can’t do it, but you get somewhere near it—you invent something new in the process.

Let’s go back to the album. The second side opens with “My Sex.” (“My sex is neither here nor there / is neither him nor her / It’s an out-of-body experience.”) How did that come about?

I thought that would be a good title. It could have turned into a kind of a jokey song, but I didn’t want to do that. The second verse is a bit darker in a way—the stuff like, “Love is invisible to the naked eye when it’s raised in the dark of two people’s minds.” My wife doesn’t like that one. She said, “Are you trying to tell me that you’re gay or something?” She just didn’t understand what it was supposed to be about.

I feel like that would be a bad way to tell someone that.

You know, I wouldn’t put it past myself.

You’d have to admit that you’re a bad communicator, interpersonally.

Yeah, exactly. I suppose part of that is because I learned about sex from being in a female household. I got a female perspective on the men in their lives. That was always there when I started trying to have relationships. I didn’t want to act like a jerk, like a typical guy, because basically all the husbands had left their wives. My dad had gone. And my cousin across the yard, her dad had gone as well. So men weren’t very popular. And I didn’t really have any kind of male figure to give me their side of the story.

What ended up happening with your mother and the guy she dated, the scuba instructor who gave you your first electric guitar?

Well, that was quite sad—I think they kind of stayed in touch, you know? I mean, the thing was that he was working on one of the Balearic Islands, teaching scuba diving. And my mum was in Sheffield with two kids. He came a few times. I really liked him. But he quite understandably did not want to live in Sheffield, when he was living in a nice warm place. He was German. He was an interesting guy. Because he gave me that guitar, I felt very grateful to him, but I’d never told him that. So I decided that I was going to try and track him down, and I made a couple of attempts, and couldn’t really find him. And then I got a German friend to write to the hotel that he used to be at, in German, and say, Is he still there? And we got a reply back saying, Yeah, he’s still here.

So I booked a holiday for me and my son to go. I was scared of scuba diving, so I never got him to teach me when I was a kid, and I thought, he can teach my son, that would be a good thing, and I could express my gratitude to him. So we went over and met him, and he couldn’t teach as a diver because he was getting quite old and he had got in a car accident a few years before. But he organized it. And me and my son did our PADI accreditation, and we hung out with him for a few days and he drove us to the airport and I said, you know, “We’ll keep in touch.”

And we went back to England. At the V. & A. Museum, in London, there was a Pink Floyd exhibition on and he was mad on Pink Floyd. So I bought him the catalogue of that exhibition and I posted it off to the hotel and then, you know, two weeks went by. I thought, What? Maybe he’s gone off Pink Floyd. He didn’t acknowledge it in any way. And I rang up the hotel and he’d died. He died basically the day after he drove us to the airport.

Oh, my God!

Yes. I mean, it was just a strange thing. I was obviously upset that he died, but the fact that I managed to say thanks to him a day before he died was, uh . . .

So what was it like when you first saw him again? Was he aware of you and your band?

Yeah, he knew that we’d become popular and everything. So he was happy with that. And when I found out that he died, I tried to think back, like, should I have known? He was showing me things, and it was like he was going through his past. So he obviously was aware that he wasn’t well, and he was trying to sort out his possessions and things like that. I just didn’t realize that at the time.

Did he have a family of his own at some point?

No. Speaking to him was interesting, actually. He said that the reason that he got into scuba diving was because you were completely alone—you couldn’t talk to anybody. You were just there floating in the void. He told me about this one night when he’d been out and something went strange with the weather and he had to spend the night on a desert island, uninhabited. And he said it was the best time of his life. [Laughs.] So he just didn’t really like hanging out with people very much.

Boy, that scene in your book where he comes to visit and he’s packed the two pieces of the guitar in different bags. It’s almost like a magic trick—someone shows up, no guitar anywhere, and then takes these two pieces, puts them together, and presto.

For ages it was the only guitar that I had. It’s not a fancy guitar. It’s called a Hopf. I still use it onstage. That’s the one I play on “Babies.” [Sings guitar line from “Babies,” from 1992.]

Imagine giving a kid a guitar and then he turns out to be a successful musician. That’s a beautiful thing.

Thank you.

After “My Sex” is “Got to Have Love,” which is the other old song on the record. I think that was from the late nineties.

“Without love, you’re just making a fool of yourself,” it says.

And then it’s got a line that the rest of the band really object to. “Without love, you’re just jerking off inside someone else.” And that’s a very unpleasant image. But for me, that was the best line in the song, in a way. It’s true. That line was directly inspired by watching a very bad film, the film version of “American Psycho” with Christian Bale in it. One bit stuck in my mind. He was about to have sex with a woman—in fact, while he was doing it, he was just looking at himself in the mirror and admiring his muscles and things. It just went so far off, you know, actually having sex with somebody.

Do you think of yourself as being imaginative? I tend to think of myself as a writer as mostly observing things and writing them down, and making something new from that, even if I’m writing fiction. Do you like making things up? Creating things?

Yeah, I do, but I also like to observe. Like we were saying, details make it realistic and make it convincing. So I’m always writing about my own experience, really. I’m not really an imaginative writer as in, invent a character and then wonder, How would he eat bread?

But definitely imagination is something that I’m a bit suspicious of. You need it to be able to imagine a song, how it would work, so it’s useful to me in that respect. But then, when you imagine what somebody else might be doing when you’re not with them, or that kind of thing—in fact, New York is an interesting place for me to talk about that, because when I first came to America, it disappointed me in some ways. Part of it was because of seeing on TV those very-wide-angle shots of skyscrapers. I thought skyscrapers would be about a mile high, and they weren’t. In “Slow Jam,” I say “Let’s have a threesome: you, me, and my imagination.” That’s trying to express my suspicion of the imagination.

Yeah. You always have to be imagining things—always filling in blanks about what you don’t know, to make sense of reality—but a lot of the things that you imagine, however rational they may be, might not be accurate, and there’s all kinds of ways for that to go bad.

Yeah, but it can also go good. Like, you know, we saw “The Clock,” and I was thinking, He must take a lot of time watching things and making notes. And to keep all that within a human brain is quite an amazing feat. I wonder if you could get A.I. to do it now. Like, you could just put in, “Tell me films that have clocks in them,” and it could probably collate something like that quite quickly. But I don’t think it would make as good a film, would it? Because somehow, just the fact that information passes through another consciousness does change it. So you get an impression of the person who made the film from that. It’s a very strict structure he had there, of trying to move through the day, minute by minute, but it’s still based on films that he’s seen, the way he’s been brought up, the period of time he’s existed in. And so you get a portrait of someone through that.

I was thinking about that, too, and about the idea of making something from scraps that haven’t been used in other things—like the Robert Frank home movies that we saw at MOMA. I like that idea of a project made from curated bits of things—that’s sort of what you did with your book.

I did. I was glad to find that way of writing an autobiography because it made it much more interesting than if I’d just sat down and tried to remember what had happened in my life. It would have been pretty boring. But because of these objects that I just put [in the crawl space] for no reason, I just stored them there and I hadn’t seen them for a long time—when I looked at one and thought, Why is this here? It would take a while for me to remember how it fit in. And then the memory that came from it would be quite a strong, fresh memory because I had not been aware of it at all.

I did have a lot of writing up there, too, but I started reading that and just gave up on it, because it felt a bit too much like I was trying to present a certain idea of what I thought I should be, rather than what I actually was. Whereas the objects, like shoes and things that I’d actually worn and used, gave a much more accurate picture of what I was like.

It’s an exciting feeling to dig up those new, fresh memories. I realized recently that “Revolution 9” can transport me immediately to childhood in a way that’s different from other Beatles songs—you don’t tend to listen to “Revolution 9” a lot. You’ve been interviewed over the years, so there are parts of your life that you’ve told over and over, I would think.

Yeah, that’s it. And that’s why if I’d tried to write it in a conventional way it wouldn’t have worked, because I’ve already said it so many times. And also songs are a way of kind of telling the story of your life, but hopefully in a more entertaining way, you know, because you’ve got music. You don’t just have to listen to someone droning on about what they’ve done in their life, you can dance to it or whatever.

The last song on the record is “A Sunset.” Brian Eno’s got this Earth/Percent organization, which is trying to get people to give the Earth a writing credit on songs. It’s a good idea—you cut it in on the publishing, the Earth. I came up with this idea of doing this PowerPoint tracing my fear of nature, which I did used to have. When my son was going to be born, my then wife had to glue shut some of the pages in this having-a-baby book. I was very worried about fainting during the birth of my son. But then when it actually happened, I forgot about that. So it’s about how I came to actually feel O.K. in nature, and even love it. I have a house in the countryside now, and I really like it.

What does it feel like, being in nature there?

The landscape doesn’t really change. When weather changes, it looks a bit different and sometimes it’s a bit greener. And that’s something that, as a human being, puts you in your place: this is going to be the same when you’ve gone. You don’t make much of an impression on this at all.

And you become aware of the seasons a lot more. You just feel the cycles of what’s going on. And for someone brought up in a city—I didn’t really like going to the countryside, I didn’t understand it­—it’s quite a good thing to feel that.

What didn’t you like when you were younger and you went to the country?

Just having to walk up hills, and things like that. Rain. Nothing to tell you what to do. Well, there are signposts, actually. I just didn’t feel at home in it at all.

And the landscape where your house is, is that different?

It’s hilly.

So now you’re O.K. with those?

I love them.

They can help with beauty and stuff. You know, you climb to the top, you look up at them, you look down from the top.

Yeah. It’s amazing.

Contemplate the beyond.

But it is good to access that. I mean, we are natural beings. That’s one of the problems with—there seems to be an attitude of man against nature, and I suppose that’s getting more pointed as climate change seems to get more extreme. So it’s like a war, us against nature. Well, you’re not going to win that fight. Really. We are natural things as well. Why can’t we all just work together? That’s what I say. [Laughs.]

Have you been experiencing art in any particular way lately? Besides what we looked at today?

I went to look at this exhibition at the Tate Modern called “Electric Dreams,” which is kind of like the kinetic stuff from before the internet. Some of it is video stuff, some of it is, like, you know, things that spin around. Quite good! I enjoyed that.

“Things that spin around” sounds so innocent somehow.

Yeah, well, it’s a different way of looking at it. There isn’t a general optimism about the future anymore, but this is from a period when there was, I suppose—they thought the future was going to be great, and technology was going to sort out a lot of problems. We played in Japan and I went to the Tower of the Sun, on the outskirts of Osaka, built for the 1970 Expo there by Tarō Okamoto. It’s amazing, a crazy building to look at—it’s got a tree of life inside that goes all the way up toward the sun, and it starts off with trilobites and things in the basement, and jellyfish . . . mankind is only very small at the top. The sun is in control. Okamoto was mistrustful of technology—he was saying, Really, you’ve got to just think of the fundamentals. If the sun went off, everything would disappear immediately. So he tried to add a bit of perspective.

You’ll be doing a big tour when this record comes out.

We will. I think it’ll be the biggest tour we’ve ever done.

How do you feel about that?

Good. As long as people come and watch it.

Your last tour really seemed to mean something to people.

Good. In a weird way, I’ve come around to the idea of Pulp again. Toward the end of it, the last two records, I wasn’t in a very good mental place. It was a strange thing. Because I’d achieved my ambition, which I’d had from being a kid, to be in a band and be famous. But it was too much for me, really. And so “This Is Hardcore,” and to a lesser extent, I suppose, “We Love Life” were made when I wasn’t sure whether I really wanted to do it, or I had a slightly ambivalent attitude toward it. So even though it’s a long time since that, the fact that we’ve come back to it, and hopefully I have managed to sort out certain things in my life—it’s a pleasure to do it now. And hopefully people can feel that. There’s no conflict in it now for me.

When you were young, before you had even gotten a band together, you were planning the band’s clothes and imagining it all vividly.

It’s like you build up a belief system. I think I thought that becoming famous would transform me in some way and would solve things that I had issues with. But I realized that it doesn’t. It was just being lazy, I suppose—to think you’ve got a magic wand that’s going to sort everything out.

You thought you personally would change, not just the way people reacted to you.

I wanted to transform, become a butterfly or whatever. It just seemed like it would take me to—as a kid, I thought that I wanted to live inside the TV. I would cross over into another dimension, which didn’t involve having to make day-to-day normal decisions; I would live in a mythic space. Which sounds very naïve to say now. And it just didn’t quite work out, you know? I used to be really nervous coming to New York. I came here toward the Christmas of 1996, and I was on my own and I kind of had a bit of a breakdown. And then whenever I came back to New York, it would remind me of that and I would start to get panicky and stuff. And I’m not panicky now. I hope you can see that. [Laughs.] I feel O.K. And you know, touch wood, it will last for a long time. That’s all I’m asking for. ♦

Eleven chapters of Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography, “Speak, Memory,” initially appeared, out of order, in The New Yorker. “Portrait of My Uncle,” one of his first prose pieces in the magazine, became Chapter 3. Chapter 1, originally titled “The Perfect Past,” came out last. Its opening line—“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness”—has, by now, been seared into numberless brains.

The most interesting texts often include tips about how to read them. Midway through “The Perfect Past,” we find an instructive anecdote. Part 1: in 1904, a family friend, General Kuropatkin, is entertaining young Nabokov with a trick involving matches when he is suddenly called away to the Russo-Japanese War. Part 2: fifteen years later, while fleeing Petrograd, Nabokov’s father is accosted on a bridge by a gray-bearded peasant, who asks for a light and proves to be Kuropatkin in disguise. Nabokov alerts readers to “the evolution of the match theme: Those magic ones he had shown me had been trifled with and mislaid, and his armies had also vanished, and everything had fallen through”—just like the toy trains he had moved over frozen puddles the following winter, imagining them crossing Lake Baikal. The “true purpose of autobiography,” Nabokov continues, is “the following of such thematic designs through one’s life.”

“Speak, Memory” reframes life itself as a detective novel sparkling with clues. Nabokov professed to “abhor” crime fiction, maybe because what he was trying to solve wasn’t a crime but its opposite: a transpersonal, death-undoing act of recuperation. Interpreted correctly, the clues would reveal the “two eternities of darkness” as an illusion. The “walls of time” would fall away—just like the last sofa cushion in the “pitch-dark tunnel” through which Nabokov, as a toddler, would propel himself “on rapidly thudding hands and knees” before emerging into the drawing room of his family’s country home.

It’s a testament to cosmic synchronicities, and the thoughtfulness of The New Yorker, that a cartoon on the page where that passage appears shows passengers in a glass-topped “dome car”—then a new technology—ducking their heads as their train rushes into a tunnel. The cartoon on the following page seems, initially, less relevant: four ladies at a card table, one declaring, “Of course you understand I don’t always have what I bid.” But consider the game—and the significance, here and elsewhere, of bridges. Consider Nabokov’s claim to have envisioned his memoir “according to the way his life had been planned by unknown players of games.” Think of other groups of seated women: of the fates, and of table-turning. A poem on the same page, at the end of “The Perfect Past,” is titled “Séance.”

Séances play a role in Nabokov’s 1962 novel, “Pale Fire”—which, like “Speak, Memory,” is an artistic effort to undo the losses incurred by time, to find the “correlated pattern in the game.” In a pivotal scene, Hazel Shade communicates with a ghostly “roundlet of pale light.” After her death, the light reappears in a poem by her father, posthumously published in “the New York magazine The Beau and the Butterfly.”

It clearly struck Nabokov as remarkable that the magazine that played a decisive role in his American career had, as its emblem, a young aristocrat examining a butterfly—a cartoonish image of Nabokov’s own youth. A lifelong lepidopterist, Nabokov often invoked the butterfly to collapse time and space. In “Speak, Memory,” he chases a swallowtail in prerevolutionary Russia, only to rediscover it, forty years later, on a dandelion in Colorado—during a sojourn made possible, he explains, because Harold Ross, The New Yorker’s founding editor, “hit it off so well with the ghost of my past.” A contract with the magazine saw Nabokov through his cash-strapped pre-“Lolita” years—and continued beyond them for three decades.

Long after Nabokov’s death, a fantastic-sounding theory that he had formulated about butterfly migration was vindicated via gene sequencing. (He had proposed that New World Polyommatus blues had originated, a bit like himself, in Asia, migrating in five waves across the Bering Strait.) In at least this instance, a Nabokovian literary resonance turned out to reflect an empirical truth. In future years, will more cases come to light? ♦

The Perfect Past

Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me.